Overview

Focusing on social robots, play, and democracy, this volume explores how AI can be used in connective ways to advance the common good and support democratic practice. This innovative collection puts play at the center of how we think about AI and democracy, exploring how playful participation may be used to help restore the creative energies of democracy. Featuring contributions by seasoned experts, the chapters explore topics such as social robots, play, and democracy; polymorphic chatbots and online interactions; AI curation by bot-supported agents and participatory environments; social robots, journalism, and connective action; civility and AI; collaboration between human and robotic agents in democratic spaces; democratic experiments, generative AI, and polymorphic robots; gaming, play, and democratic engagement between humans and nonhumans; and AI, play and democracy. This book presents new ideas for how connective AI and social robots could be used to help reimagine and improve our everyday lives; specifically, how playful interaction with robotic agents could help revive civic engagement, thus ushering in a new paradigm for connective AI. This book will be of interest to upper-level students, researchers, and scholars across a variety of fields, including media and communication studies, science and technology studies, and political science, particularly those exploring AI and human–computer interaction in relation to democracy and civic life.

Full Product Details

Author:   Zizi Papacharissi
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
ISBN:  

9781032762128

ISBN 10:   1032762128
Pages:   324
Publication Date:   05 May 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate: Visually Generative AI and the Civic Imagination 3. Gaming the System 4. AI Has Joined the Chat: Exploring the Role of Generative AI Assistants in Group Chats 5. The Silent Chatbot: On the Democratic Significance of Silence in Ai-Mediated Communication 6. Beyond Representation and Bias: Mimicry and Distillation through generative a.i. 7. Digital Inequality in ChatGPT Awareness and Knowledge 8. Mainstreaming AI: How Journalists Play with Emerging Technologies 9. Designing the AI Maze: How the Tech Industry Entraps Users 10. The Feminist Artificial Intelligence Playbook 11. Privacy at Play: Anticipating Hyper-Personalization in Conversational Robot Toys 12. Do Asians Respect AI More? Towards the “Social Exchange Agents Principle” and “Human-Machine Harmony” for Communicative AI Ethics 13. Playing with AI in Video Games: Lessons about the Human Main Character Syndrome from Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) 14. {Not} All Fun and Games in Virtual Reality: The State of Pro-social and Antisocial VR Play 15. Talking to Non-Stochastic Parrots: Human-Machine Communication and Human- Animal Communication in Parallel Lines 16. The Model Museum: AI at the Museum-Museum Interface 17. Gen AI in Support of Democratic Debates? The Case of Environmental Activism 18. Voice of the Ogiek: Play, Co-Design, and the Spiral Return of Orality in Connective AI

Reviews

""Can artificial intelligence serve democracy or only disrupt it? Moving beyond Silicon Valley's standard narratives, this volume proposes connective AI: technology designed with democratic values at its core rather than as afterthought. This stellar group of scholars explore alternative approaches to human-machine relations grounded in imagination, play, and collective renewal."" - Kate Crawford, Professor at the University of Southern California, author of Atlas of AI

Author Information

Zizi Papacharissi is UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Illinois Chicago and Department Head of Communication. She is also a university scholar and affiliate faculty with the Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published ten books and over 80 journal articles and book chapters and serves on the editorial boards of 15 journals. She is the founding and current editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. Her work has been translated into Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian.

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